User reviews

I found out something interesting. I looked up why the Falcon's name was changed from Lawrence to Waring to Watling. I never did find out why it changed from Waring to Watling (and you can hear they dubbed the name over every single time they said it).

However, I found out that there were two different Falcons by two different authors. The Sanders/Conway Falcon was one, and the ones with John Calvert is actually the other series.

At any rate, this is the usual low-budget poverty row film. A man named Delgado shows up while the Falcon is taking a bath and announces he's killed a man. He'll go to the police, but he gives the Falcon $500 and a key to hold for him.

Of course people want the key, which opens up a locker in a bowling alley. One of the reasons I like old films is that we see things that aren't around anymore - like public lockers that can hold bombs. In fact, this one did!

I guess I'm in the minority here, but I don't agree about John Calvert. I don't think he was bad, although I didn't like him in the final film. In this one he's more animated, and the film has a little humor.

Also, someone on this board was quite dismissive of his talent. Calvert was a magician who taught and performed magic until he died - at 102. He played the London Palladium at 100. We should all be so accomplished.

First of three post war Falcon films is very different than the Tom Conway/George Saunders series. Certainly the character is unrelated being named Michael Waring as opposed to Gay or Tom Lawrence. This is an extremely poverty stricken film that looks more like the shot on film TV series from a few years later. Still it manages to score points for being its own little engine of entertainment.

The plot has Waring, played by John Calvert as a wise talking, magic doing, detective given 500 dollars by a client to hold on to a key for him. He is to give the key to his attorney when he asks for it. The client it seems has just committed a well publicized murder which he thinks he won't be tried for. Not long after the client is taken into custody Waring begins to be tailed, some one wants the key. Someone also wants his client dead and he somehow murdered in his jail cell.

While not the Falcon most of us know, this is a good little mystery. The plot takes a few unexpected turns which coupled with Waring's magic and attitude makes this one to watch despite its cheapness. This is one to find and watch with a big bag of popcorn.

A man called 'Lucky' is murdered, proving that nicknames are often misleading. Paul Marion visits John Calvert, who's playing the Falcon in this flick, gives him $500 and a key to give to his lawyer if he's not found not guilty of murdering Lucky, before he turns himself in for killing him. Complications ensue.

It starts out looking like a 1930s movie, with performers like Rochelle Hudson, Tom Kennedy, Lyle Talbot, Theodore von Eltz and Roscoe Karns in the supporting cast. Calvert plays the Falcon with a pencil-thin mustache, a Ronald Colman imitation that comes and goes, and sleight of hand magic tricks. He entered the movies as a magician, doing hand doubles for actors like Gable, and here was his shot at a lead, albeit in an independent movie.

The script is a pretty good one, but Calvert demonstrates that it takes more than a pencil-thin mustache to be a movie star. He made two more Falcon movies within a year, then a couple more supporting roles. By 1956, he was gone from the movies, back to being a stage magician.

If Calvert's career in the movies didn't last, Calvert himself did. He died in 2013 at the age of 102.

This was the first of three films made by the small "Film Classics" company in 1948-49 starring actor-magician John Calvert as The Falcon, and it's very much unlike the latter two films. In this one, Calvert does magic tricks at various times throughout the movie (!!) AND his co-star is a dog named Brain Trust (!!!) who is listed as playing "himself." Calvert actually talks to the dog in some scenes. Perhaps the dog was a nod to the successful Thin Man films, but fortunately the dog routine was dropped in the latter two films, as were the magic tricks (which are a pleasant distraction,actually!). The film starts, and ends, with Calvert sitting in his bathtub! In the first scene, a man named Ramon Delgado comes to see The Falcon and confesses that he killed a man last night because the man was involved with his wife. Delgado feels that the killing was in self-defense and asks the Falcon to help him turn himself in to the police and see that his rights are respected. Of course, as this is a murder mystery, things are obviously not as simple as that, and the plot unfolds in a fascinating way. As in the other films in the series, the resolution is unexpected and quite exciting. This film was directed by John Link, a journeyman who mostly worked as an editor, and it also features some nice location shooting in 1948 L.A. A fine supporting cast of veterans--Roscoe Karns as the police lt., Rochelle Hudson as the seductive Mrs. Delgado, Theodore Van Eltz as a seedy attorney, Lyle Talbot as a mysterious "business man",

and comedian Tom Kennedy, who often played a dim-witted copy, as a dim-witted thug! Trivia note: supporting actor Michael Mark appears in small but significant roles in all three Falcon films... in this one, he's the man working at the Salvation Army. Calvert's smooth, laid-back, but witty approach to the Falcon role is a refreshing change-of-pace, and it's a shame they only made three of these films. This is by far the quirkiest of the three, the latter two being more straight-forward detective films minus dog routines and magic tricks. All three Calvert Falcon films are recommended to fans of low-budget 40s murder mysteries/detective films.

The handsome and urbane John Calvert gives a tough yet breezy performance as Hollywood private eye Michael Waring - code named "The Falcon" . Although Calvert possessed a polished and charismatic screen presence and appeared in nearly thirty films for RKO and Columbia his first love remained the art of magic through which he became an international variety star.

This is a real bargain basement production and there's one particularly curious quirk that's worth listening for. Whenever any of the supporting cast refer to the last name of Calvert's character it's obvious that changes have been made in the post production process. Specifically, it seems that the name "Waring" has been cut out on each occasion and substituted with "Watling". The obvious question is .. why ? Possibly some kind of copyright issue ?

This is the first of the three low budget Falcon mysteries after RKO had ditched the character. Here he comes in a different guise played by the career magician John Calvert. He has a cute dog called Brains Trust. The funniest Brains Trust moment is when the docile dog has been tied to a chair by an intruder to the Falcon's apartment.

Other bizarre moments include a skull ornament that chatters. Obviously the Falcon has learned magic skills to operate the skull to do this. I like the poster for this film that shows the skull wearing a magician's top hat. It's an attractive piece of film poster art that helped to attract my attention to this movie in the first place.

The mystery begins when a character named Delgado visits the Falcon for help to get him off on a crime of passion crime-alleviation charge with the police. He says he has killed a man for fooling with his wife. But is he being straight? The plot becomes more involved as suspicion passes from one character to another.

I reckon that this is a well disguised whodunit. Only a twist at the very end causes the real murderer to be revealed.

Gay and Tom Laurence (real life brothers George Sanders and Tom Conway) were the Falcon in the early 1940s. So why is a guy named 'Wattling' now appearing in some poverty row series where HE is called the Falcon as well?! In addition to not being the Falcon, this guy acts nothing like the suave and sophisticated Falcon of old. The new guy has a cute dog(!?) and talks incessantly--and he's just nothing like the originals.

As for the rest of the film, it's bizarre and nothing like the old Falcon plots either. Some knucklehead comes to Wattling and claims he murdered someone (so why didn't he just go to the cops first?!?!?). But, soon after, the admitted killer is himself murdered in prison--poisoned. So, Wattling appoints himself a some sort of avenging angel and spends the rest of the film trying to figure out who was behind all this--as well as to figure out what the man was REALLY planning before he died.

While the plot has some nice twists, the characters are just all wrong, the acting is terrible and I wouldn't even recommend this to Falcon freaks--as he's just a shadow of the originals at best. Dreadful on many levels.

This is the 14th Falcon film, and the first of three starring John Calvert as a detective based on Michael Arlen's character the Falcon. After these three, the Falcon films ended. In my review of the final one, I shall give a chronological list of all 16. The title of this film has no relevance to the film whatever, as there is no devil and no cargo. Nor is the film anything to do with ships and the sea, as 'cargo' might imply. (There was a silent film in 1925 called THE DEVIL'S CARGO, but it is apparently lost, no surviving person appears to have seen it, and it can have had no connection with this one.) This film is a pastiche, very badly acted, extremely low budget, and should not really have been called a Falcon film. The producers presumably paid something for the right to use the name, but there all resemblances end. John Calvert appears to have some admirers, and I would not wish to depress them too much, but let's put it like this: there are two kinds of charm, natural charm and practised charm. George Sanders and Tom Conway (real-life brothers) had the former and John Calvert makes an attempt at the latter. Those of us who like the real thing can only be annoyed. However, he does his best, and really tries, so let us be merciful and not turn it off. The film does have about a dozen instances of snappy dialogue, such as this exchange: Falcon: 'Are you going somewhere?' Dame: 'My maid let the canary out and I'm going looking for it.' Not the highest calibre gags, but some are amusing and witty. As for the mystery story, it has some excellent twists and shows creative planning. Undemanding viewers of old mystery movies will probably enjoy this one. The idea of the mysterious key to a locker containing a bomb which explodes and kills the inquisitive enquirer who opens it is a new angle. (Were there Taliban in 1948?) And it genuinely is difficult in this film to guess whodunit, since the man who confesses at the beginning of the film is not guilty of killing the stiff. Also, the means of delivering a fatal poison to a man in a jail cell is novel and ingenious. I must remember that the next time my psychopathic neighbour is arrested, or perhaps when a certain crooked accountant finally gets locked up. When one thinks about it, there are so many candidates! Just joking. It so quaint that one man when questioned by the police in this film is asked why he carried a revolver to meet the murdered man (but didn't use it), he says as casually and nonchalantly as can be: 'I always carry a revolver.' And he is not challenged further. That was then and this is now. Ah, those were the days when a bulge in a pocket really did not mean one was pleased to see Mae West. There is a pathetic attempt to liven this film up by giving John Calvert a dog called Brains Trust (the real dog who plays the dog had the same name, funny that). But John Calvert is no William Powell, as Lloyd Bentsen might have said, and Brains Trust only knows how to bark, pant, and shake hands. That's it. Well, two more to go.

Sometimes it seems that the person that writes the descriptions of these old movies, does so from a place of not liking old movies to begin with. You have to look at them from a different perspective. They are more pantomime and play rather than the way movies are created today. If they aren't gritty film noir type flics meant for adult audiences then they have a more light approach to them even the murder mysteries. Think of them as a PG family murder mystery. Personally I liked the movie. Sadly I can't find the other two movies in the series. If someone knows where to find them post me a link thanks.

If you're thinking that there is another Falcon brother after Tom Conway and George Sanders before watching Devil's Cargo you'd be wrong. Actor/magician John Calvert goes by the Falcon, but he's not a Lawrence brother.

He's got a line of chatter that never gives out, a cute dog, and some magic tricks.

Calvert's services are retained by Paul Marton who says he killed a known gambler for fooling around with his wife Rochelle Hudson. Then Marton is killed in custody and a third man is killed in an explosion.

An interesting murder plot is revealed, but the production values are dreadful and Calvert just ain't up to either George Sanders or Tom Conway.

The Falcon returns...sort of. Not really. Two years after the RKO Falcon series ended, Poverty Row studio Film Classics began their own series. There's not much this has in common with the George Sanders/Tom Conway films. The Falcon, now played by John Calvert, has a new name: Michael Watling. Gone is the comic relief sidekick. Here the Falcon has a dog he talks to. Also gone are charm, wit, adventure, and everything else that worked in the previous series. This is just a generic detective tale, made on cheap sets with a forgettable lead backed up by a cast of actors who had seen better days. The RKO series was great. Even if the plots weren't always riveting, you could always rely on Sanders and Conway to deliver and the production values were usually very nice. This is just a big nothing burger. Sadly there are two more 'fake Falcon' films after this.

They probably should have stopped making Falcon movies when George Sanders and Tom Conway had finished their runs with the franchise. Hard to watch the Falcon become a shell of his old self. Spending more time with his dog than the ladies, and driving a Studebaker. The script may be okay, but it has a low-budget B Movie feel to it.

This is great entertainment from beginning to end mainly because of its brilliant dialog that works like cross fire all through in a labyrinth of constant bewildering complications of a murder case, in which the murderer immediately confesses to the murder and then is poisoned to death in jail. His reason for the murder was jealousy over his wife, who was seeing a certain racketeer called Lucky Conroy - the film begins with his murder. More will follow. The detective called upon to resolve this mess of amassing murders is a magician who constantly plays wonderful tricks on everyone around which certainly amuse the audience, especially the trick with the duck, called out from nowhere. It's a delightful thriller reminding of the best days of William Powell, Myrna Loy and Asta, the 'Falcon's dog Braintrust would have matched Asta perfectly. In the end there is one murder too much and even by mistake, but it's a long way before you get there through all the intricacies of a goofed up criminal intrigue.